New Bob Dylan Documentary Explores His Late ’70s/Early ’80s Jesus Freakery
By Mike McHugh on 09-23-2008
We last left career retrospective-era Bob Dylan in Martin Scorcese’s sublime No Direction Home, where mobs of British naysayers assailed our American treasure with every manner of hiss and boo because they refused to believe Dylan knew how to use objects that employed electrical current. At the documentary’s end, Dylan is a man betrayed, furious that his once adoring public turned on him with just one look at his Fender Stratocaster and Garth Hudson’s mighty beard parked behind a Hammond organ. But despite the film’s somber conclusion in 1966, all you Dylanmaniacs watching at home knew the world would eventually screw their heads on straight and embrace the new Bob, and in the years that followed, Dylan continued to reinvent himself, all while glutting the American songbook with new standards.
That is, until 1979 when Bob found Jesus and decided to tell everyone about it over the course of two-and-a-half terrible albums (the first side of 1979’s Slow Train Coming is pretty good). This still divisive, hyper-evangelical era serves as the subject for the latest Dylan documentary, Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born…Again!. Directed by enormous Dylan-dweeb Joel Gilbert and released by his distribution company/tribute band Highway 61 Entertainment, the straight-to-DVD doc boasts interviews with Dylan’s Bible class teacher Pastor Bill Dwyer (I assume he’s not the same dude who hosted Battlebots), the late, great producer Jerry Wexler (TMT News), plus two members of Dylan’s backing band and a few assorted journalists. Though Dylan himself was not interviewed for the film, he appears in footage shot from 1979 to 1983 where he explains his religious beliefs in his music, including a never-before-seen 1981 interview.
I doubt this documentary, slated for an October 28 release, will convince the non-believers that “Bob Dylan's ‘Jesus Years’ are today regarded as among the best of his career,” as the DVD case so boldly claims (Who the hell said that? Rick Santorum?). Still, as long as Gilbert can reign in his Dylanophilia at least a little bit and focus on the facts, Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years should provide some much-needed explanation about this impossibly awful section of Bob Dylan’s career. Seriously, listen to Saved! and try to count how many times your eyes roll. I bet you’ll lose count by track three.
New Poll Reveals 95% of Americans Just Can’t Get Enough Jarboe Facts, Upcoming Release News
By Liz Louche on 09-23-2008
When I started writing this story, I knew several things about Jarboe, the eerily ethereal female vocalist for legendarily abrasive New York band Swans and well-regarded, cult solo performer. These things were mostly personal, and not really interesting probably either to you (the reader) or to my handful of friends who have been subjected (even worse!) in person to said facts. The Jarboe-related knowledge I had was (a) the more disturbing the economic and political news gets on television, the more I wanna wear my Swans t-shirt to work, and (b) that I totally missed seeing Jarboe at SXSW and accidentally spent the entirety of her set watching some frat-boy cover band and being really confused. But now, thanks to the world's most informative press release, I have learned things that are actually interesting, things that I will now pass on to you in my possibly inaugural Top Lucky Number 7 Fun Facts about Jarboe:
1. Her parents were in the FBI.
2. She previously sang in a lounge act.
3. She has performed in cathedrals, museums, and public schools (presumably not with the lounge act).
4. Apart from her work with Swans and its side-project World of Skin, she has performed with Blixa Bargeld, Jim Thirwell, Alan Sparhawk, Steve Severin, Neurosis, David J, Bill Laswell, Lustmord, Pansonic, and Jesu, among many, many awesome others.
5. Her upbringing included experiences with religious snake-handling rituals in the Deep South.
6. She has collaborated with visual artists like Richard Kern and Beth B, and more!
7. She voiced a cartoon, The Venture Brothers.
But the real news is this: before the year is through, expect to see the lady's latest full-length on The End Records. Entitled Mahakali, the album features performances from Julia Kent (Rasputina), Philip Anselmo (Pantera, Down), Vinny Signorelli (Swans, Unsane), and Attila Czihar (Mayhem). Also on the docket for the upcoming months are the release of a "collective audio documentary" called The Sweet Meat Love And Holy Cult and Jarboe's work for the game The Path, created by Auriea Harvey. And, finally, expect a lengthy tour schedule to promote Mahakali early next year. Let the countdown to 2009 begin!
SanDisk Releases Music on SD Card, Intended For Those Who Still Don’t “Understand” the Information Super Highway – Also, For Idiots
By munroe on 09-23-2008
SanDisk, the world's second-best company at selling portable audio players, has just announced a new music format -- music on SD Cards -- intended to compete with Compact Discs. For the younger crowd, the Compact Disc was created in the mid-’80s to facilitate the technological leap from analog to digital recordings. Compact Discs (or CDs, as they were known) were sold in plastic receptacles called jewel cases, which also contained artwork, liner notes, and occasional bonus content (such as videos). As technology plodded along, the CD was rendered obsolete by digital distribution services such as Napster, Morpheus, AudioGalaxy, and OiNK.
It warrants a fair amount of suspicion why SanDisk would choose the third quarter of 2008 to release "slotMusic," a music format whose direct competitor has already begun their liquidation sale -- but stranger things have been successful (fuck you, Gwar). There are rumors circulating that SanDisk's fearless leader lost a bet to his infant daughter over the exact time of poopy, but there also exists the slim possibility that SanDisk actually believes there is a market for a new physical format in a landscape that has increasingly shown waning interest in physical media as a whole. Like, you know, cuz it's on a tiny SD Card instead of a big CD, and shit.
Regardless of baseless speculation, SanDisk will go ahead with slotMusic in the upcoming months, hoping to covet the lucrative granny-owning-blackberries demographic with an initial run of 30 hot new albums from Akon, Chris Brown, Ne-Yo, Rihanna, Robin Thicke, Weezer, Usher, Leona Lewis, and other major label-owned musicians. All the music sold in the slotMusic format, which has a 1GB capacity, will be 320 kbps DRM-free MP3s and will also include album artwork, liner notes, and occasional bonus content (such as videos). The cost is estimated between $7 and $15 and will be sold in major retail locations, such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart. They will probably be found next to the CDs.
Mogwai’s Martin Bulloch Hospitalized, Tour Canceled
By Kenny Bloggins on 09-22-2008
Awwww, holy fuck buttons. Martin Bulloch, Mogwai's rhythmic force, was rushed to the hospital shortly after the group's ATP performance this
past weekend due to complications from a recent pacemaker surgery. Bulloch recently had a new pacemaker put in, and, of course, the rest of the guys decided to auction off the old one on eBay (it has since been removed from eBay). Unfortunately, the new pacemaker isn't working as planned and was alluded to as the catalyst for Martin's trip to the hospital.
The official statement from Martin, via Mogwai's site:
I was taken into hospital last night almost immediately after the show at ATP. I've been having some problems with my pacemaker for the duration of the tour and it unfortunately culminated in me being sent to the emergency room. The doctors there initially thought i would have to have corrective surgery at a larger hospital nearer NYC but i have been given the all clear to travel home on the understanding that
i go straight to my cardiologist on arrival back in Scotland.
Consequently, Mogwai have decided to pack it up and return to Scotland, with all North American dates canceled (their European tour starting October 21 is still up in the air). Considering Martin and the rest of the band's warm and jolly nature, I hate to hear news like this, and we at Tiny Mix Tapes wish Martin a speedy recovery.
To tide you over, check out our interview with Stuart Braithwaite here, and be on the lookout for The Hawk is Howling (TMT Review), which drops tomorrow. The album will provide the scalp-scalding tide-me-over until Mogwai return to fuck up a town near you.
RIP: Mauricio Kagel, Avant-Garde Composer
By Shane Mack on 09-22-2008
From an article by The New York Times:
Mauricio Kagel, an avant-garde composer whose often absurdist works blurred the boundaries between music, theater and film, died on Wednesday in Cologne, Germany. He was 76. [...]By temperament a dadaist and provocateur, Mr. Kagel drew on the musical examples of composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. In “Anagrama,” a work from the 1950s, singers and instrumentalists were called on to emit notes, squeaks, whispers and shouts corresponding to an elaborate system derived from the letters in a Latin palindrome.
- Mauricio Kagel Wikipedia entry
- Mauricio Kagel site by Björn Heile
- YouTube video: Mauricio Kagel- "siegfriedp"
- YouTube video: Mauricio Kagel: "Der Eid des Hippokrates" (1984)
